Shakespeare's Jest Books (Barnes & Noble Digital Library) [NOOK Book]

Overview

This edition includes a modern introduction and a list of suggested further reading.

Shakespeare’s Jest Books is an anthology of humorous, often bawdy anecdotes and jokes from late medieval England. Collected in 1864 by the British bibliographer William Carew Hazlitt, the jest books are haphazard in their authorial ascriptions: they have origins in the oral tradition ...

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This Book

Overview

This edition includes a modern introduction and a list of suggested further reading.

Shakespeare’s Jest Books is an anthology of humorous, often bawdy anecdotes and jokes from late medieval England. Collected in 1864 by the British bibliographer William Carew Hazlitt, the jest books are haphazard in their authorial ascriptions: they have origins in the oral tradition and anthologized the professional foolery of noted clowns Richard Tarlton and Will Kemp.

Shakespeare’s most notable direct reference to the jest books appears in Much Ado About Nothing, during one of the play’s memorable witty exchanges between Beatrice and Benedick; Beatrice complains to her gentlewoman Ursula of Benedick: “that I had my good wit out of the Hundred Merry Tales—well, this was Signior Benedick that said so.”

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Meet the Author

No one would have seemed better qualified to confer dignified status upon such unlikely matter as jest books as William Carew Hazlitt (1834–1913), descended from a man commonly regarded as second only to Samuel Johnson as England’s greatest literary critic, especially for his writings on Shakespeare. Hazlitt’s works as author and editor include not only Shakespeare’s Jest Books but also AHandbook to the Popular, Poetical, and Dramatic Literature of Great Britain (1867), Four Generations of a Literary Family: The Hazlitts (1897), The Letters of Charles Lamb (1886), The Lambs (1897), and Shakespeare, the Man and His Works (1902).

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